The Fast One (v5)

This major release increases page load speed dramatically. The page now scores roughly 90/100 on Google’s PageSpeed Insights (up from ~50) and has a high score on similar tools.

NOTE: This post is outdated and only included for legacy reasons. See the Documentation for up-to-date instructions.

Most importantly, the critical rendering path is no longer blocked by loading styles or scripts, meaning the site becomes visible faster.

Page load speed matters to Google, but is also very apparent to visitors with slow internet connections.

However, as a side effect of these optimizations, the site now has a visible FOUC. Future versions might address this, but it is the currency in which loading speed is being payed for and can not be fully avoided.

Major

HTML, CSS and JS served minified.

JS downloading starts only after the rest of the page is rendered.

Critical CSS (above-the-fold) is inlined into the document, the rest is fetched later.

In order to minify the CSS and make it more modular it has been rewritten in SCSS.

Minor

Colored focus outline in page color

Tabindex for tab navigation

Social media icons easier tappable with finger

Trivia

Not strictly part of the release, but the images have been blurred to increase text readability and help with loading speed as well (burred images get compressed by JPG much better).